El Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 11:49:32AM +0100, Howard Winter escribio:
>
> OK, I misremembered the actual measurement (surely it must be a million metres, 10,000km?) but I knew it was
> devised by the French.

Yes, it's 10000Km from equator to poles, or 10.000.000 meters. :-)

> Sorry, I have to disagree here.  I just meausured cups in my house and they vary from 200 to 400ml, and by
> your own logic, a cup could be said to be half a pint...  I don't know *anyone* who's pace is a metre - pace

I was talking about a big step, here we are educated in meters,
so you learn to take big-steps to measure things in meters.

> taller than Napoloen, who I believe was responsible for it)!  And an Imperial Gallon is 10lbs of water,
> although that's not widely known.  Here in England we number houses serially, with no distance involved, and

Yes, I visited London and learned that... to someone accustomed to how
the house numbers are here, it's very confusing !

> certainly no consistent distance between them, or between streets.  (Incidentally, if your streets are 100m
> apart, does that imply that where you are each property is 50m deep?).

No, there are 4 sides in each square, so the distribution isn't as
simple. In the old downtowns, originally each square had one big house,
with a central garden inside. Remember that the spanish build our cities
all with the same blueprints :-)

Now, you usually see streets of 50m, so each "square" is actually 50x100
meters.

> I find that metric measurements
> (especially of weight) are too "big".  Food here is old in grams, and I find that most prepacked foodstuffs
> are in odd amounts, a quick check in the kitchen reveals weights of 200, 300, 310, 320, 410, 420, 600g.
> Nothing is 250 or 500g, let alone 1kg!

Well, here we have the duality: when you buy fresh fruits, vegetables,
etc, you buy at kg (so, you usually buy 1kg of apples, etc.). But
packaged food is sometimes in "imperial-converted units". Beberages
are sell in liters when the quantity is large (ie, 2, 2.5 or 3 liters
of cola), but in odd numbers when it's small (the little bottle of
cola is 385cc).

    Daniel.

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